
Sign up to save your podcasts
Or


The door to the walk-in cooler slammed shut behind Jack Barsky. This is it, he thought, this is how it all ends – in a restaurant in the Deep South at the hands of a crazy Irish-American eight inches shorter than me. “He said he was taking me through a secret passage to a speakeasy.” But it was not the end that day in Atlanta, 30 years after the Cold War’s end, but a new beginning. The residual fear felt by the former deep-cover KGB illegal soon dissipated and a new friendship was born over drinks. We ended up, “at a very small bar, looking out through a two-way mirror at all the people in the restaurant, what a great place for two old spies to be.” Hear Jack Barsky (if you’ve ever watched The Americans he worked for the real-life “Directorate S”!) and former US Navy Counterintelligence Agent, Keith Mahoney (if you’ve ever seen NCIS, he was in its 1980’s equivalent) swap war stories. They grew up on either side of the Cold War divide, drank the ascribed kool-aid, lived parallel lives – and ended up best buds! Enjoy.
By SpyCast5
44 ratings
The door to the walk-in cooler slammed shut behind Jack Barsky. This is it, he thought, this is how it all ends – in a restaurant in the Deep South at the hands of a crazy Irish-American eight inches shorter than me. “He said he was taking me through a secret passage to a speakeasy.” But it was not the end that day in Atlanta, 30 years after the Cold War’s end, but a new beginning. The residual fear felt by the former deep-cover KGB illegal soon dissipated and a new friendship was born over drinks. We ended up, “at a very small bar, looking out through a two-way mirror at all the people in the restaurant, what a great place for two old spies to be.” Hear Jack Barsky (if you’ve ever watched The Americans he worked for the real-life “Directorate S”!) and former US Navy Counterintelligence Agent, Keith Mahoney (if you’ve ever seen NCIS, he was in its 1980’s equivalent) swap war stories. They grew up on either side of the Cold War divide, drank the ascribed kool-aid, lived parallel lives – and ended up best buds! Enjoy.

1,531 Listeners

4,791 Listeners

281 Listeners

8,077 Listeners

2,275 Listeners

1,415 Listeners

1,666 Listeners

1,960 Listeners

371 Listeners

347 Listeners

2,854 Listeners

266 Listeners

628 Listeners

41 Listeners

1,153 Listeners